Shadowfacts

In this tutorial, we are going to create a custom creative tab that players can use to access all of our items when in creative mode.

Creative Tab

First off, let’s create our creative tab class. Create a class called TutorialTab that extends CreativeTabs. It will need a couple things:

1. A no-args constructor that calls the super constructor with the correct label.
2. An overriden getTabIconItem which returns the item to render as the icon.

The String passed into the super constructor is the label. The label is used to determine the localization key for the tab. For the label, we are going to pass in TutorialMod.modId so Minecraft uses our mod’s ID to determine the localization key.

The item stack we return from the getTabIconItem will be rendered on the tab in the creative inventory GUI. We’ll use ModItems.ingotCopper as the icon so our creative tab has a nice distinctive icon.

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package net.shadowfacts.tutorial.client;

import net.minecraft.creativetab.CreativeTabs;
import net.minecraft.item.ItemStack;
import net.shadowfacts.tutorial.TutorialMod;
import net.shadowfacts.tutorial.item.ModItems;

public class TutorialTab extends CreativeTabs {

	public TutorialTab() {
		super(TutorialMod.modId);
	}

	@Override
	public ItemStack getTabIconItem() {
		return new ItemStack(ModItems.ingotCopper);
	}

}

Let’s add a field to our TutorialMod class that stores the instance of our creative tab.

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// ...
public static final TutorialTab creativeTab = new TutorialTab();
// ...

Updating Everything Else

Now that we’ve got our creative tab all setup, let’s change all of our items and blocks to use it.

Let’s add a line to the end of our BlockBase and ItemBase constructors that calls setCreativeTab with our creative tab.

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public BlockBase(Material material, String name) {
	// ...
	setCreativeTab(TutorialMod.creativeTab);
}

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public ItemBase(String name) {
	// ...
	setCreativeTab(TutorialMod.creativeTab);
}

We’ll also need to add this line to the BlockCropCorn and ItemCornSeed classes because they don’t extend our base item/block classes.

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public BlockCropCorn() {
	// ...
	setCreativeTab(TutorialMod.creativeTab);
}

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public ItemCornSeed() {
	// ...
	setCreativeTab(TutorialMod.creativeTab);
}

Lastly, we’ll need to update our ModBlocks and ModItems classes so we’re no longer setting the creative tabs to other tabs.

Remove the setCreativeTab call from the end of the BlockOre constructor on the line where we register/create the copper ore block.

Remove the setCreativeTab calls from the copper ingot and corn items in ModItems.

All Done!

Now when we start the game and open the creative inventory, we should be able to see our creative tab on the second page.